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Carnival of Space #564 This week’s Carnival of Space is hosted by Brian Wang at his NextBigCoins blog. Click here to read Carnival of Space #564 And if you’re interested in looking back, here’s an archive to all the past Carnivals of Space. If you’ve got a space-related blog, you should really join the carnival. Just email an entry to susie@wshcrew.space, and the next host will link to it. It will help get awareness out there about your writing, help you meet others in the space community – and community is what blogging is all about. And if you really want to help out, sign up to beRead More →

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In the face of climate change, deforestation and biodiversity loss, creating a sustainable version of civilization is one of humanity’s most urgent tasks. But when confronting this immense challenge, we rarely ask what may be the most pressing question of all: How do we know if sustainability is even possible? Astronomers have inventoried a sizable share of the universe’s stars, galaxies, comets, and black holes. But are planets with sustainable civilizations also something the universe contains? Or does every civilization that may have arisen in the cosmos last only a few centuries before it falls to the climate change it triggers? Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

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Pluto has “Sand Dunes”, but Instead of Sand, it’s Grains of Frozen Methane In July of 2015, the New Horizons mission made history when it conducted the first flyby in history of Pluto. In the course of conducting its flyby, the probe gathered volumes of data about Pluto’s surface, composition, atmosphere and system of moons. It also provided breathtaking images of Pluto’s “heart”, its frozen plains, mountain chains, and it’s mysterious “bladed terrain”. These strange features showed people for the first time how radically different the surface of Pluto is from Earth and the other planets of the inner Solar System. But strangely, they alsoRead More →

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Language in the Cosmos I: Is Universal Grammar Really Universal? The METI Symposium The symposium How could you devise a message for intelligent creatures from another planet? They wouldn’t know any human language. Their ‘speech’ might be as different from ours as the eerie cries of whales or the twinkling lights of fireflies. Their cultural and scientific history would have followed its own path. Their minds might not even work like ours. Would the deep structure of language, its so called ‘universal grammar’ be the same for aliens as for us? A group of linguists and other scientists gathered on May 26 to discuss theRead More →

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ALMA and VLT Find Too Many Massive Stars in Starburst Galaxies, Near and Far Astronomers using ALMA and the VLT have discovered that both starburst galaxies in the early Universe and a star-forming region in a nearby galaxy contain a much higher proportion of massive stars than is found in more peaceful galaxies. These findings challenge current ideas about how galaxies evolved, changing our understanding of cosmic star-formation history and the build up of chemical elements. ESO News Feed Go to Source Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

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Supermassive black holes at the nuclei of most galaxies, including our Milky Way, develop gradually as material accretes onto the seed black hole. The physical processes that drive this growth – the so-called feeding and feedback processes – occur in the vicinity of the galaxy nucleus. When the accretion becomes active, radiation is emitted that illuminates and ionizes the gas in the vicinity of the nucleus. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

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Using NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, an international group of astronomers has discovered a doubly eclipsing, bound quadruple star system. The newly found system, designated EPIC 219217635, consists of stars similar in size to our sun, with masses ranging from 0.41 to 1.3 solar masses. The finding was presented May 24 in a paper published on arXiv.org. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

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This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows a cluster of hundreds of galaxies located about 7.5 billion light-years from Earth. The brightest galaxy within this cluster, named SDSS J1156+1911, is visible in the lower middle of the frame. It was discovered by the Sloan Giant Arcs Survey, which studied data maps covering huge parts of the sky from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The survey found more than 70 galaxies that look to be significantly affected by a cosmic phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

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The supercomputer Cray XC50, nicknamed NS-05 “ATERUI II” started operation on June 1, 2018. With a theoretical peak performance of 3.087 petaflops, ATERUI II is the world’s fastest supercomputer for astrophysical simulations. ATERUI Ⅱsimulates a wide range of astronomical phenomena inaccessible to observational astronomy, allowing us to boldly go where no one has gone before, from the birth of the universe itself to the interior of a dying star. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

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Engineers Propose a Rocket that Consumes Itself as it Flies to Space When it comes to the new era of space exploration, one of the primary focuses has been on cutting costs. By reducing the costs associated with individual launches, space agencies and private aerospace companies will not only be able to commercialize Low Earth-Orbit (LEO), but also mount far more in the way of exploration missions and maybe even colonize space. Several methods have been proposed so far for reducing launch costs, which include reusable rockets and single-stage-to-orbit rockets. However, a team of engineers from the University of Glasgow and the Ukraine recently proposedRead More →

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Clearly a Fan. Jeff Bezos Himself Announced that Amazon was Picking up The Expanse At Comic-Con 2015, fans of space opera and science fiction were treated to their first glimpse of The Expanse, the miniseries adaptation of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck’s novels. Needless to say, the reaction was magnificent, and is perhaps best up by IO9’s Lauren Davis, who penned a review of the trailer titled, “The Expanse Is the Show We’ve Been Wanting Since Battlestar Galactica. It was therefore a bit of a blow when recently, the Syfy network announced that the third season (which is currently airing) would be the show’s last. ReactionRead More →

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Weekly Space Hangout: May 30, 2018: Skylias – Science Communicating on Twitch! Hosts: Fraser Cain (universetoday.com / @fcain) Dr. Paul M. Sutter (pmsutter.com / @PaulMattSutter) Dr. Kimberly Cartier (KimberlyCartier.org / @AstroKimCartier ) Dr. Morgan Rehnberg (MorganRehnberg.com / @MorganRehnberg & ChartYourWorld.org) Special Guests: This week, we are excited to welcome Skylias, aka “”Sky”” to the Weekly Space Hangout. Sky is a science communicator on Twitch.tv. She discovered her passion for live streaming science, mainly astronomy/physics on Twitch.tv, while working towards her own science degree. Sky graduated magna cum laude from Regis University with a B.S. in Computer Science. While not in front of the camera orRead More →

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NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, SOFIA, is heading to Christchurch, New Zealand, to study celestial objects best viewed from the Southern Hemisphere. Observations will include targets that are too low to observe or not visible at all from the Northern Hemisphere—including our neighboring galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud, the center of our own Milky Way galaxy, and Saturn’s moon Titan. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

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We’re happy to share with you an update from our partner Unistellar. The team has recently collected a pair of images of the glorious Sombrero Galaxy (M104 in the Messier Catalog) taken during one of their  most recent observing runs. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

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Last year, the first detection of gravitational waves linked to a gamma-ray burst triggered a vast follow-up campaign with ground and space telescopes to study the aftermath of the neutron star merger that gave rise to the explosion. ESA’s XMM-Newton observations, obtained a few months after the discovery, caught the moment when its X-ray emission stopped increasing, opening new questions about the nature of this peculiar source. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →